After reading the rule I found Venus is superior to some other gods that prevent to take ONE penalty token in restricted case, while Venus removes TWO penalty tokens without the restriction. I wonder why Venus is so good than those gods.

I mean, when I want to use a Beige dice 5 as a Black dice 6 without taking any penalty tokens, I have 2 ways to do.Case 1) I use Jupiter to change it to Black effect, then use Phoebus to increase the effect by 1. That's two cards.Case 2) I take a penalty token and change it to Black effect, then take a penalty token to increase the effect by 1, and then use the Venus to return the 2 penalty tokens. That's one card.

See, with Venus I only need one card, and it can act as any combination of two of Jupiter, Junon, Minerve, Neptune, and Phoebus.

I'm not sure that I'm a fan of this design philosophy - When cards are randomly drawn, I generally don't think that there should be a particular card that is better than another card in every possible circumstance.

In Seven Sisters, for instance, the wild card duplicates the primary function of any other card, but has no secondary/tertiary function, giving it flexibility but at a cost of lower power. Venus, on the other hand, combines flexibility with twice as much power as the other gods.

However, since a player will typically be drawing more deity cards than they will keep, I'd imagine that the potential for random swings in card power would be minimised, and it would be unusual for a player to ride the Venus train to victory while the other players stare forlornly at their inferior Jupiters.

Penalty tokens do not have an effect until the end of the game, so preventing the gain of a token is equivalent to taking then discarding.

Deities can play at any time during your turn, so if given the choice between taking Jupiter and taking Venus, I cannot imagine any scenario where taking Jupiter would be a good idea. Jupiter lets me ignore the colour of a die without taking a penalty token, but Venus lets me do any two penalty token actions and then return both penalty tokens.

Oh wait - I can think of one scenario where Jupiter would be more useful - if there are no penalty tokens left in the pool, and you have no penalty tokens behind your screen, Venus would be useless.

However, that doesn't seem a very likely scenario, and is easily avoided by making sure you always keep a couple of penalty tokens behind your screen. I don't accept that premise as an explanation of balance.

Can anybody explain how choosing and playing Venus instead of choosing and playing Jupiter is an example of wasting the gods' potentials?

[Edit - This is not meant to be a negative criticism. I trust that if Venus is all-round superior to some of the other gods, that is something that works within Massilia. My 'issue' is solely that Alain seems to be saying that the other gods are just as important, when it seems clear that Venus is at least twice as powerful of most of them.]

Interesting point, KAndrw. Unfortunately I still do not understand alainE's answer. From what I see Venus is the best option one can receive (as far as I understand rules) - if anyone deeply comprehends the whole thing, please tell me if/where I'm wrong.